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Thomas Wilmer Dewing

1851–1938
BirthplaceBoston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
Biography
Painter Thomas Wilmer Dewing built his artistic career around the depiction of languorous, aristocratic women in subtle images that explore the boundaries of beauty, harmony, and refinement. Dewing was born in Boston and apprenticed in a lithographer’s shop. He studied art informally in Boston and excelled at portrait likenesses in chalk; a number of these, executed during a brief stay in Albany in 1875-6, financed a year’s stay in Paris, where Dewing was the first American student to enroll at the Académie Julian. Dewing began exhibiting paintings in New York in 1878 with the newly founded Society of American Artists; he moved there two years later to teach at the Art Students League. Marriage to the successful still-life and portrait painter Maria Richards Oakey (1845–1927) introduced him to New York’s artistic, literary, and social elites.

The Dewings became leaders in the American aesthetic movement, whose ideal of decorative harmony, influenced by American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler and contemporary English artists and writers, elevated color and form over narrative content. Dewing painted society portraits as well as decorative figural works, often on vaguely antique themes, emphasizing delicate coloring and modeling and flat, overall patterning in the aesthetic mode. He received several important mural commissions through his good friend, architect Stanford White (1853–1906), and won the patronage of such wealthy collectors as John Gallatly (1853–1931) and Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919).

Around 1890, Dewing began to specialize in generic images of women. He portrayed small, frieze-like groups set into vaguely defined, twilit landscapes inspired by the setting of Cornish, New Hampshire, where the Dewings were the center of an exclusive art colony between 1885 and 1905; in later paintings and pastels, he focused on solitary, idle women in sparsely furnished interiors, such as the Terra Foundation’s Madelaine (TF 1999.45) and Portrait of Lady Holding a Rose (TF 1999.46). Dewing’s subjects and aestheticizing approach to modern themes allied him with the progressive artists’ group Ten American Painters, with whom he began exhibiting in 1897.

Muted in shimmering softness, Dewing’s slender, refined figures are contemporary but timeless, aesthetic objects at one with the paintings’ harmonious compositions and tonal color schemes. His decorative arrangements are indebted to Whistler, to Japanese art, to Renaissance portraits, and to the interior paintings of women by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1553–1660). Dewing’s images transcend his own dictum that the purpose of the artist is to “see beautifully”: often haunting and ambiguous, they subtly evince contemporary anxiety about the evolving place of women in society, the decline of New England’s old social elite, and the changes heralded by urbanism, industrialism, and modernity.